scholarly journals Kantian Ethics Towards A Justifiable Business And Trade Practices: Envisaging A Humanitarian Society

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 9
Author(s):  
Chris O. Abakare
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reason ◽  
Code Of Ethics ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
Kantian Ethics ◽  
Moral Law ◽  
Kingdom Of Ends ◽  
The Law ◽  
Kant's Ethics

The Kantian code of ethics is guided by pure practical reason and since reason is consistent and permits no exceptions to favor the lawmaker or its adherent, the moral law is also consistent and inflexible. This nature of the law is very significant for trade as trade norms cannot be flexed to favor a particular nation or company. This paper believes that Kantian cosmopolitanism should be the credo of business and trade. The reason for this assertion is because the ultimate goal of humanity is a prosperous living of all people in a spirit of unity. Humanity is at its best when rising above the barriers of race, caste and creed. And Kant's ethics has always recommended a path for humanity that leads to this cohesion. Ethical commonwealth, cosmopolitanism, League of Nations and Kingdom of ends have in themselves this one-point agenda to envisage a humanitarian society that takes pride in peaceable solidarity of human existence. 

Reason, Humanity, and the Moral Law

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. A. Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Moral Law ◽  
Practical Identity ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Law ◽  
The One ◽  
Kant's Ethics

This chapter comments on Christine Korsgaard's views on reason, humanity, and moral law in the context of her ethics. In particular, it examines Korsgaard's response to the question inspired by Thomas Hobbes' second argument, the one about the sovereign: how can the subject be responsible to a law that it makes and can therefore unmake? Korsgaard's ethics descends from Immanuel Kant, but it contrasts in important ways with Kant's ethics. Korsgaard's subject is unequivocally the author of the law that binds it, for its law is the law of its practical identity, and the subject itself “constructs” that identity. In the case of the Kantian subject, we can say that it both is and is not the author of the law that binds it. The chapter considers Korsgaard's claim that morality is grounded in human nature, along with her position on the problem of normativity and on obligation.

Hermann Cohen and the Jewish Neo-Kantians

2011 ◽  
pp. 213-224
Author(s):  
David Novak
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
German Society ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Kantian Ethics ◽  
Moral Law ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Law ◽  
Hermann Cohen ◽  
Secular State

This chapter reviews Hermann Cohen's presentation of the Noahide laws. Cohen desired to show that Jews in late nineteenth-century European (and especially German) society could be and were in fact good citizens, and that their Judaism was an aid to citizenship. Judaism was not an insular religion, and Jews supported the secular state, Cohen affirmed. For instance, he maintained that the aim of the law of adjudication was “objective lawfulness,” a signal starting-point for any society, secular or religious. Cohen's view of moral law was shaped by Kantian ethics. He argues that Noahide law confirms the humanity of gentiles, and that this rabbinic construction was the first of its kind. Recognizing the humanity of others is the beginning of autonomous ethics. For Cohen, the human ethical future is best presented through Jewish universalism, leading to universal ethical monotheism in the messianic age. This last point has been central to liberal Jewish theology since Cohen's time.

scholarly journals Kant, Schiller, and the Idea of a Moral Self

Kant-Studien ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 111 (2) ◽  
pp. 303-322 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katerina Deligiorgi
Keyword(s):  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Moral Law ◽  
Moral Self ◽  
The Law ◽  
The One ◽  
Kant's Ethics ◽  
Alternative Idea

AbstractThe paper examines Schiller’s argument concerning the subjective experience of adopting a morality based on Kantian principles. On Schiller’s view, such experience must be marked by a continuous struggle to suppress nature, because the moral law is a purely rational and categorically commanding law that addresses beings who are natural as well as rational. Essential for Schiller’s conclusion is the account he has of what it takes to follow the law, that is, the mental states and functions that encapsulate the idea of moral self contained in Kant’s ethics. Focusing on the fundamental psychological elements and processes to which Kant’s theory appeals and on which it depends to have application, the paper defends an alternative idea of moral self to the one Schiller attributes to Kant.

scholarly journals Deduction of morality and freedom in Kant’s ethics

2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-42
Author(s):  
Milica Smajevic
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reason ◽  
Moral Principle ◽  
Moral Law ◽  
The Third ◽  
Direct Contrast ◽  
Metaphysics Of Morals ◽  
Kant's Ethics ◽  
Radical Shift ◽  
Objective Validity

In the third section of the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant seeks, on the basis of the idea of the necessary presumption of freedom, to provide a deduction of the supreme moral principle and to prove its objective validity. Three years later, in the Critique of Practical Reason, he explicitly denies the possibility of making such deduction, and by changing methodological assumptions, tries to show that awareness of the moral law as a fact of reason is the basis for the deduction of freedom. In this paper we will argue that a direct contrast between Kant?s two texts clearly shows that a radical shift in his thought has taken place. The purpose of this text is to show that Kant had reasons to be dissatisfied with the deduction of the moral law offered in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, which led him to change his argumentative course when writing the Second Critique.

Evil and the Subordination of the Moral Law

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Papish
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reason ◽  
Good Reason ◽  
Moral Law ◽  
Textual Evidence ◽  
The Law

This chapter asks what it means to say, as Kant does in the Religion, that evil consists in the “subordination” of the moral law to self-love. In other words, it is asked what kinds of formal arrangements between the incentives of practical reason—self-love and respect for the law—are possible in an evil will. While evil can consist in the “prioritization” of self-love over respect for the law, such prioritization is not, it is argued, the only way the incentives of practical reason can be wrongfully arranged. There is good reason to think that, for Kant, evil can result from “overdetermination” or the attempt to incorporate the incentives of both respect and self-love alongside one another in the same fundamental maxim. This proposal is defended throughout the chapter, with care taken to explain its philosophical value and the textual evidence directly or indirectly in its favor.

scholarly journals Kantian Ethics and the Animal Turn. On the Contemporary Defence of Kant’s Indirect Duty View

Animals ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 512
Author(s):  
Samuel Camenzind
Keyword(s):  
Animal Rights ◽  
Ethical Framework ◽  
Arthur Schopenhauer ◽  
Kantian Ethics ◽  
Turn On ◽  
Conceptual Clarity ◽  
Moral Relationship ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Kant's Ethics ◽  
Animal Question

Criticism of Kant’s position on our moral relationship with animals dates back to the work of Arthur Schopenhauer and Leonard Nelson, but historically Kantian scholars have shown limited interest in the human-animal relationship as such. This situation changed in the mid-1990s with the arrival of several publications arguing for the direct moral considerability of animals within the Kantian ethical framework. Against this, another contemporary Kantian approach has continued to defend Kant’s indirect duty view. In this approach it is argued, first, that it is impossible to establish direct duties to animals, and second, that this is also unnecessary because the Kantian notion that we have indirect duties to animals has far-reaching practical consequences and is to that extent adequate. This paper explores the argument of the far-reaching duties regarding animals in Kant’s ethics and seeks to show that Kantians underestimate essential differences between Kant and his rivals today (i.e., proponents of animal rights and utilitarians) on a practical and fundamental level. It also argues that Kant’s indirect duty view has not been defended convincingly: the defence tends to neglect theory-immanent problems in Kant’s ethics connected with unfounded value assumptions and unconvincing arguments for the denial of animals’ moral status. However, it is suggested that although the human-animal relationship was not a central concern of Kant’s, examination of the animal question within the framework of Kant’s ethics helps us to develop conceptual clarity about his duty concept and the limitations of the reciprocity argument.

Kant on the Ground of Human Dignity

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Apaar Kumar
Keyword(s):  
Human Dignity ◽  
Reciprocal Relationship ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Moral Law ◽  
Human Constitution ◽  
The Law

Abstract Kant interpreters have contrasting views on what Kant takes to be the basis for human dignity. Several commentators have argued that human dignity can be traced back to some feature of human beings. Others contend that humans in themselves lack dignity, but dignity can be attributed to them because the moral law demands respect for humanity. I argue, alternatively, that human dignity in Kant’s system can be seen to be grounded in the reciprocal relationship between the dignity of the moral law and the dignity inherent in the human constitution. The latter includes the dignity of personhood, construed as rational inner purposiveness, and the dignity of giving oneself the law and striving to follow it.

Law as Practical Reason

1989 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 436-471 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. J. Detmold
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reason ◽  
Practical Reasoning ◽  
Legal Reasoning ◽  
The State ◽  
Strong Sense ◽  
A Priority ◽  
The Law ◽  
John Finnis ◽  
Vast Range

Law is practical. Legal reasoning is practical reasoning. We could make nothing of a judge who having listened to counsel's arguments and reflected about the law governing his case thought that the state of knowledge that he had achieved was the natural termination of his enterprise and submitted his conclusions to the editors of Halsbury's Laws of England rather than performed the action of giving judgment. The parties would be outraged, and rightly. And if the judge continued to do such a thing he would be dismissed. Legal reasoning is practical in the sense that its natural conclusion is an action (in the judge's case the action of giving judgment) rather than a state of knowledge. This is taking “practical” in a strong sense. By this definition thought is practical whose natural conclusion is an action (or decision against action): its strongest contrast is with theoretical thought whose natural conclusion is knowledge. But it also contrasts with hypothetical thought about action (say, my thinking it would be good to play cricket again). I do not call this practical because it does not conclude in an action or decision against action (others do; for example John Finnis in Fundamentals of Ethics; my reasons for differing in this matter will emerge). A judge's practical reasoning towards the action of giving judgment has priority for our understanding of law over that vast range of practically idle things that lawyers do, from the construction of digests like Halsbury to casual reflection about the rule in Shelley's case (of course there is one sort of doing involved in both these, but not legal doing). It is important here to be clear about this priority. It is a priority of practicality, not a priority of judges or lawyers.

scholarly journals The Phoenix of Colonial War: Race, the Laws of War, and the ‘Horror on the Rhine’

2017 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 847-875 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROTEM GILADI
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Recent Literature ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Laws Of War ◽  
Black Soldiers ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Imperial Governance ◽  
The Phoenix

AbstractThe article explores the demise of the ‘colonial war’ category through the employment of French colonial troops, under the 1918 armistice, to occupy the German Rhineland.It traces the prevalence of – and the anxieties underpinning –antebellumdoctrine on using ‘Barbarous Forces’ in ‘European’ war. It then records the silence ofpostbellumscholars on the ‘horror on the Rhine’ – orchestrated allegations of rape framed in racialized terms of humanity and the requirements of the law of civilized warfare. Among possible explanations for this silence, the article follows recent literature that considers this scandal as the embodiment of crises in masculinity, white domination, and European civilization.These crises, like the scandal itself, expressedantebellumjurisprudential anxieties about the capacity – and implications – of black soldiers being ‘drilled white’. They also deprivedpostbellumlawyers of the vocabulary necessary to address what they signified: breakdown of the laws of war; evident, self-inflicted European barbarity; and the collapse of international law itself, embodied by the VersaillesDiktattreating Germany – as Smuts warned, ‘as we would not treat akaffirnation’ – as a colonial ‘object’, as Schmitt lamented.Last, the article traces the resurgence of ‘colonial war’. It reveals how, at the moment of collapse, in the very instrument embodying it, the category found a new life. Article 22(5) of the League of Nations Covenant (the Covenant) reasserted control over the colonial object, furnishing international lawyers with a new vocabulary to address the employment of colonial troops – yet, now, as part of the ‘law of peace’. Reclassified, both rule and category re-emerged, were codified, and institutionalized imperial governance.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document